While style and slick visuals are important in Web site design, they shouldn't detract from a site's usability and functionality. Here are some hands-on tips for look and feel, readability, discovery of affordances, and more, with plenty of examples of good and bad design.

A persona is a description of a fictional person representing an amalgamation of traits found in a segment of your users. Emplolying personas arms you with a powerful foundation on which to base design decisions.

As I described in SharePoint: The Wild West of Software Development there is a serious problem when you develop for SharePoint: ensuring quality through unit testing is really, really hard. And that's where a new open source tool just released today called sporm (SharePoint Object Relational Mapper) comes in. While sporm provides many benefits besides simplified unit testing I wanted to focus on this topic first, because sporm's approach, which models the entity framework in the way it supports POCO's, is a unique feature not available with other SharePoint tools like LINQ to SharePoint.

Fault injection testing is the process of deliberately inserting an error into an application to determine whether it deals with the error properly. We'll explain how you can introduce faults into .NET applications at run time using the Managed Code Fault Injection APIs of the TestApi library

VPL, part of Robotics Developer Studio is intended for novice programmers, but is also useful for testing and prototyping. We write a simple serial port service that allows you to send and receive data.